This post has been updated with new information and new sections. If you’ve read this post before, I recommend jumping to: Far from perfect, What’s new, and Enhancements coming soon. Otherwise, please read on from the beginning…
Juicy Miles is a user-friendly flight award search tool. I didn’t think it was possible. There are so many gotchas in trying to build a tool like this that most of those who have tried before have either given up or have created specialized tools that appeal only to experts. Somehow the Juicy Miles team has done it. It’s not perfect (is anything?), but it’s way better than I would have ever predicted.
For the first time ever, there’s a single tool that can handle the vast majority of award search needs. This isn’t just looking at the easy stuff such as “can I book a United flight with United miles?” No, no, no. This tool is capable of finding award flights on airlines that most never would have thought to look at. And it will show you how to get there, not just with your airline miles, but also with your transferable points: Amex Membership Rewards, Capital One “Miles”, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi ThankYou Rewards, or Marriott points.
Disclosure: Trust me at your own risk ($10 risk)
Frequent Miler has a business relationship with Juicy Miles. We earn a small percentage when you click through from our site to sign up for Juicy Miles, or to hire Juicy Miles award and/or mileage run booking services.
I think/hope that most long time readers trust me enough to know that, despite the opportunity to earn a few bucks, I wouldn’t recommend this service unless I thought it was really good. Everyone else, though, should go into this with some skepticism. If someone is financially motivated to promote a product, you absolutely should question their motives.
In my case, I value my blog’s reputation far, far more than the small amount of money I could possibly earn from this business relationship. Even if I was driven entirely by greed, it would be a dumb move to promote a bad product. Still, it’s worth keeping my motives in mind as your read further.
I’ll discuss the pricing options later in this post, but for now note that you can pay a one time $9.99 fee for 5 days of unlimited Juicy Miles award searches. In other words, it’s not free to try it, but it’s cheap.
Overview: Kayak-Like Flight Award Search
Suppose you want to fly from New York to Tel Aviv, and nothing but business class would do. The Juicy Miles search screen is completely intuitive:
After a very short wait, you get a page full of results organized by points program (Capital One, Chase, …, Delta, United, …). Click on a rewards program to see the flight options. Click on a flight option to see details about the individual flight segments.
In the example above, many results are for 2 stop itineraries. If you only want one stop, you can filter results by clicking the “Refine” button. That brings you to a screen where you can select max number of stops and whether you want to see only all-business class or if mixed itineraries are OK (where one leg is in business and one in economy, for example).
On the refine screen you can also select the specific rewards programs that you have points with. To keep things simple for this example I chose only Capital One, Chase, and American Airlines AAdvantage. And since I personally value Chase Ultimate Rewards much higher than AA miles, I opted for the 70K AA award instead of the 69K Chase award:
After I click on the first flight shown for AAdvantage, I see the complete flight details for the Royal Jordanian flights booked with AA miles. Juicy Miles says that the award will cost 70,000 miles plus an estimated $223 in fees. Once I click “Select this Flight”, Juicy Miles displays instructions for how to book the award. Easy!
Pricing
The Juicy Miles flight award tool has two pricing options (see the image above for full details):
- $9.99 for 5 days
- $29.99 per month (special introductory pricing)
In my opinion, most people should start with the one-time $9.99 plan. If you find the service helpful and need more than just 5 days, only then consider moving to the $29.99 plan. One big exception: If you’re about to pay for Juicy Miles full service booking or mileage run planning, you would save money by signing up for the $29.99 plan first since that will give you a 25% discount on the full services. If you don’t want to pay for multiple months, simply cancel before the first month is over. You can cancel online with a click of a button:
Other reasons to consider the monthly option is for extras such as free miles & points consulting, “Upgrader” (supposedly they’ll look for better award seats as your travel date gets near), and complimentary route monitoring. I haven’t tried any of these extras so I can’t recommend them at this time. I’m not saying they’re not valuable — I just don’t know. And, to be completely honest, I’m wary of the free “credit card consulting”. Will Juicy Miles use this as a way to sell credit cards to you even if their affiliate links aren’t the best offers? The owner of Juicy Miles, Adam, is a friend (at least he was a friend until I wrote this part). I don’t think he would do that. But I think it’s important to point out that possibility. Update: Adam promises that they don’t push credit cards. He says: “no credit card pushing unless you ask for our advice – and even then they are the best possible offers for a given trip. “
Review: Good for beginners
Beginner profile: You have airline miles in one program, most likely AA, Delta, or United. You might have transferable points too, but you don’t know what transferable points are or why they’re powerful.
In many cases, if you have miles in just one program, you would find it just as easy to search for awards with that program’s own web interface. Let’s say you have only Delta miles. In that case, you can simply use Delta.com to search for award flights. The main advantage for you to using Juicy Miles, then, would be that Juicy Miles may find better awards that are not available to book online, but most of the time you’d probably do just as well with using Delta.com for free.
The real power with Juicy Miles comes when you have points in a transferable points program. You might not even know that your Amex, Capital One, Chase, Citi, or Marriott points can be transferred to airline programs, but that’s OK. Juicy Miles will show you when one of those programs offer you the best value for an award.
Here’s an example. Suppose you want to fly business class from Seattle to Paris and you have only Chase points and Delta miles. You’ve already determined that the cash price is way too high. So you run the search on Juicy Miles and you filter to just Chase and Delta. You see then that on the date you want, you would have to pay 280,000 Delta miles for a one-way non-stop flight:
You also see that you could book with Chase points for as few as 70,000 points, so you click Chase (see below). Now you see that the 70,000 point options involve 2 stops. You don’t like that idea, so you click the nonstop option. There you learn that you can fly nonstop business class on Air France for 118,000 points. That’s not exactly cheap, but compared to Delta’s price it’s a bargain.
Let’s say that you’re willing to pay the 118,000 points to get the flight you want. When you select the flight, you then get booking instructions (see below). You can now either follow the steps presented to book the award yourself, or pay Juicy Miles $49.99 to complete the booking for you.
Review: Great for intermediate users
Intermediate profile: You have miles and points in multiple programs. You have transferable points, but you’ve used them only to transfer points to programs you know and understand. You’re aware that you may be able to get more value by transferring to other programs, but you’re not comfortable with your knowledge of many foreign programs in order to find these awards and/or to understand the pros and cons of pursuing those awards.
In my opinion, you’re in the sweet spot for the Juicy Miles tool. Since you have transferable points, you are much more likely to find awards that meet your needs than if you only had miles with a few airline programs. Plus, Juicy Miles will help you pay fewer points for the same flights. For example, if you were to book a Star Alliance award on your own, you might simply transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points to United to make the booking. But Juicy Miles might show you that you could save a lot of points by transferring to another Star Alliance carrier. And, since Juicy Miles shows how to book awards once you’ve selected them, you can most likely complete the entire process on your own.
Review: Good for experts
Expert profile: You have miles and points in multiple programs, including multiple transferable points programs. You know the sweet spot awards available through multiple foreign mileage programs. You’re comfortable with the idea of booking free stopovers and open-jaws on award tickets.
No matter how expert you are, you have to admit that, without Juicy Miles, searching for award availability across many programs is frustrating and time consuming. Worse are the situations where you have to call to find out if award availability exists at all. Juicy Miles is fast. It will save you time. Even better, it somehow finds award space in some situations where you’d otherwise have to call. For example, suppose you want to use Virgin Atlantic miles to book a Delta flight to Frankfurt, Germany. You can’t search for this online because Virgin Atlantic doesn’t know that Frankfurt exists:
You could use the Air France website to search for Delta’s award availability and then call Virgin Atlantic to find out pricing. Or, you could run the same search via Juicy Miles, and learn instantly whether the award is available and what it costs when booked via various mileage programs. In this example, the award prices for this one flight are 67.5K with Air France, 280K with Delta, 50K with Virgin Atlantic, or 59.5K (plus ~$185) with Virgin Australia’s Velocity Frequent Flyer miles. If you want to book the cheapest option, Virgin Atlantic, you would still have to call Virgin Atlantic but at least you would know the expected price and whether or not the award was available before calling.
Why some will hate this tool
On some routes, there are fantastic award flights that are widely available, but only if you know how and where to look for them. With Juicy Miles, many people are likely to stumble upon these awards without realizing they were special. As more and more people book these awards, the award space will dry up. Those who knew about these awards before will be ticked off when they find that they can no longer get those awards whenever they want them.
It’s sort of like the people who had secret routes for bypassing traffic during rush hour. Map programs like Waze and Google Maps made those routes available to everyone and that undoubtedly increased congestion on those alternate routes.
Far from perfect…
Some bugs
I’ve used Juicy Miles for the past couple of months to search both for real trips and imaginary trips. Along the way I ran into a few bugs and limitations which the Juicy Miles team quickly fixed. It is a work in progress. I think it’s amazing what it does right now, but the Juicy Miles team is actively enhancing the tool almost daily. As a result, it will get even better, but they’ll inevitably introduce more bugs as well. I have no doubt that some readers who try out the tool will encounter a bug or two. Hopefully those bugs won’t be showstoppers for you, but either way I’d encourage you to report them to the Juicy Miles team. That way the tool will improve for everyone.
Inaccurate award availability
There are times where Juicy Miles shows results that aren’t really bookable (false positives) or fails to show awards that are bookable (false negatives). Given how incredibly complex flight awards can be, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Here’s an example: a friend of mine needed a domestic flight, but Juicy Miles failed to show any good results. She then tried AA.com and quickly found a very good saver level one-stop award. What happened? At the time of this writing, Juicy Miles only has access to award space that AA displays to partners. Meanwhile, AA often prices multi-segment itineraries at the saver level when booking directly through AA. If you search AA.com for availability on the individual segments that make up that award, you won’t find saver level awards.
An arguably worse outcome would be if Juicy Miles shows an available award that can’t actually be booked. In that case, you might transfer points to an airline program and then be stuck without a flight. That’s why Juicy Miles always recommends double checking the award directly with the airline program that you’ll be transferring points to.
Inaccurate award pricing
In some cases Juicy Miles correctly shows award availability, but doesn’t show the correct award price. One examples of this that we’ve seen is with Delta round-trip awards. Delta often prices round-trip awards less than two one-way awards, but Juicy Miles displays only the one-way award prices.
No self-service alerts
Award availability is not a static thing. Awards that aren’t available today may become available later. That’s why award alerts are a crucial feature for a tool like this. I’ve been told that you can email the JuicyMiles team to request an alert to be set up behind the scenes and that they’ll email you if the alert is triggered. That’s better than nothing, but I’d far prefer a feature letting you setup alerts yourself. Adam tells me that this ability is coming soon.
High subscription price
The monthly pricing model is an issue too. $29.99 per month adds up to $359.88 per year. That’s a lot. I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m just saying that you better make sure that the tool is offering a lot of value before you commit. Luckily, you can easily cancel online at any time. When first trying the tool, I recommend starting with the $9.99 plan for 5 days of unlimited use. If you only book big award trips once or twice a year, you may find that you can pay the $10 once or twice a year and be done with it. Or, you may find that the tool is so valuable that you’ll decide that it’s worth upgrading to the monthly plan.
Personally, I’m very lucky to have been given free access to the tool. And I do love having it available. But, I don’t think I use it enough to justify $29.99 per month. If I had to pay for the tool, I’d wait until I really needed it and start with the $9.99 plan. If I couldn’t complete my bookings within 5 days, I may then consider upgrading to the $29.99 plan for a month or two if I felt that I really needed it.
What’s new
Better business and first class results
When the Juicy Miles award search tool first debuted, business class award searches were cumbersome. The problem was that Juicy Miles showed too many results. The results included itineraries where only one small regional flight was in business class and the rest was in economy. That problem is now fixed. When searching for business class awards, Juicy Miles now only includes itineraries where 51% or more of the distance flown is in business class. Plus, the results screen shows at a glance the percentage of each trip that is in business class:
Transfer bonuses automatically displayed
Juicy Miles will now show you if there are any active transfer bonuses from transferable points:
Even better, Juicy Miles automatically calculates points required based on current transfer bonuses. For example, here I searched for flights from Detroit to Frankfurt. I filtered to non-stop flights and found that I could fly Detroit to Frankfurt in business class for only 38,462 Amex Membership Rewards points. In each of the cases displayed below, Juicy Miles shows the same flight but with different prices depending on which points you use. If you use Chase or Citi points, you would transfer 50,000 points to Virgin Atlantic to book the flight. With Amex, you only have to transfer 38,462 (really 39,000 since Amex won’t let you do smaller than 1K chunks) thanks to the 30% transfer bonus that is active at the time I write this:
Etihad Award Availability Trick
American Airlines miles are great for booking Etihad flights, but you need to know the trick to find one-way availability from the US: search round trip from Abu Dhabi and look for award space on the return leg. Juicy Miles embeds this trick so that it works automatically.
Enhancements coming soon
Here are some of the enhancements that Adam expects to release in the near term:
- Mobile site: the Juicy Miles website is not optimized for mobile browsers. Instead, look for a Juicy Miles site to be released soon.
- Ability to search up to 1 week at a time: This will show you up to 3 days prior to your target date through 3 days after your target date. Currently the tool allows only 1 day in either direction.
- Filter by points: If you don’t want to see results for flights that cost over a set number of miles, you’ll be able to filter accordingly.
- Point transfer times: When you select a flight using transferable points, Juicy Miles will show you an estimate of how long it will take for your points to transfer to miles. This is very helpful because some transfers can take as long as a week. In those cases, your intended award flight is unlikely to be available by the time you’re ready to book it.
- Flight Alerts. Set an alert for any specific flight and receive an email when the flight becomes available. This feature is already available behind the scenes (you can email the JuicyMiles team to request an alert to be set up). At some point, this feature will become available within the “my account” section of Juicy Miles.
Conclusion
There are other award search tools, but none that I’ve seen come close to Juicy Miles’ power and ease of use. Expert Flyer is probably the closest competitor and it may even be a better fit for experts. But Expert Flyer requires that you know in advance which carriers you want to search award space on. And they leave it up to you to figure out then how much those awards would cost and which award program is best to use. Juicy Miles does all of that automatically.
All of that said, Juicy Miles is far from perfect. Flight award availability and pricing can be horrendously complicated. Real world availability and pricing can vary depending upon whether your award search is conducted by segment or start to end, one-way vs. round-trip, direct on the carrier’s site or via a partner. As a result of these complexities, the tool doesn’t always get everything right. This can be especially frustrating given that the tool is not cheap. I think that $10 for 5 days is a fair price, but if you want an uninterrupted subscription it will cost you $30 per month which adds up to $360 per year. That’s a lot to pay for any tool, but it’s even harder to swallow when considering the tool’s occasional inaccuracies.
Despite the above concerns, I really do think that Juicy Miles is the best tool of it’s kind… by far. Now that I’ve had a chance to use it regularly, I’d hate to do any serious award searches without it. And I know from chatting with Adam that the tool will get better and better with time.
As discussed in the Disclosure section of this post, Frequent Miler will earn a commission if you click through from our site and pay for Juicy Miles. Thanks in advance if you do so! Here’s our link: Juicy Miles Award Search Tool
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
[…] Dhabi to New York. I can’t find the same flights available on AA.com, so I tried searching via Juicy Miles. Juicy Miles shows about $300 in fees via American Airlines vs $206 on Etihad. It’s possible […]
[…] It is not a tool for finding the best award deal available. For that you may want to check out Juicy Miles. Also check out our in-depth post: Best ways to get to Africa using […]
[…] Alternatively, use a tool like Juicy Miles to find actual award availability and actual award prices to where you want to go. This tool costs $9.99 for a 5 day pass. You can read my full write-up here. […]
It’s still very weak. Tried another $9.99 but it’s almost useless for business class long distance – comes up with anything over 51% in Business. United’s site is MUCH better for any Star Alliance. Doesn’t show Avianca.
Waste of money again – no better than 6 months ago, actually slightly worse (you used to be able to specify 100% business.
.
[…] that’s why I’ll note that I was happy to see that Juicy Miles does accurately show the discounted pricing already. I’ve actually been using the tool a lot […]
I just signed up for 5 day. I think it’s pretty good but unless I’m mistaken I don’t think it really does very well for certain programs that make more of their inventory available to their own program members. I think this must be drawing from the best partner booking search engines in many cases, because I don’t think for example it shows KE availability. Not sure about SQ. And there are other programs like that. Maybe I’m wrong and just haven’t figure it out yet.
It does show KE and SQ availability, but I believe you’re right that it’s only the space available to partners.
Actually, I guess it is showing some KE availability, but not all and not all SQ. Again, I probably posted this prematurely and would have to do more testing so I might not be accurate.
[…] availability and pricing like I normally do but I wanted to try out a website I saw mentioned on Frequent Miler and One Mile at a […]
I tried the tool for some recent bookings and it couldn’t find awards that were bookable majority of the time.
1) East Coast to Europe. Using the tool I figured that flights to Rome seemed to have better availability but it showed no saver level available for the day I wanted. I tried searching on Flying Blue and found business class IAD-FCO for 70k miles.
2) GDL-YVR. The tool was only finding awards on UA and DL operated flights none at saver level on any date. I searched on Flying Blue and booked AM flights for 14k miles.
3) CHS-YVR. It showed some saver awards available on United but I found a better routing on United website that was not showing up and booked first class on AC for 25k miles.
4) YVR-CHS. Accurately showed no saver awards available.
5) CHS-LAX/ONT/BUR. The tool failed to show a Delta flight that was bookable with Virgin miles.
[…] used the Juicy Miles tool for my searches, but it’s possible to find most of the same results by searching a number of […]
I paid the $10 to try it out. It found an award flight via AA but it didn’t show me the same flight can be booked on AS using 25k fewer miles. Not sure if they don’t support AS but that’s not very helpful.
Sorry to hear that. One of the problems with the site right now is that it doesn’t sort the results by the cheapest options. As a result, the Alaska option is often way down below where you would have to scroll down to see it. I’ve made that mistake myself where I thought it wasn’t there, but it was. I know it doesn’t help your situation, but I’m told that they’re working on that issue.
I do not usually comment on posts, but I spent the $10 X 2 and managed to book an amazing trip for 2 from PHL – SIN (business), SIN – PER (business), PER – MEL (business), MEL – NRT (economy), and NRT – PHL (premium economy). All different airlines (LOT, Singapore, Quantas X 2, and JAL) and using all different combos of miles and points. I’m not new but I’m not a wizard either and I NEVER would’ve been able to piece this together if not for Juicy Miles. It was $20 well spent for sure. All free hotel nights too 🙂
If you don’t mind to share, How many miles in all?
Using your link gives us nothing better than the public offer. Seems like there should be some price break.
Agree with the comments of many others that the $5.95 5-day price is worthless if you do not find any availability at that time. However, I am only being presented with the $29.99 per month option. Way too pricey with no way to evaluate it before paying.
Edit: Have to click on Pricing in the top level menu to see the $9.95 option. Should present all options when you are searching and signing u. Makes no sense to hide it.
I signed up for a month to test it out and book my Maldives trip. The Etihad search was nice and found awards easily. I booked an Etihad award it had found from IAD-MLE in business.
I was a little disappointed to see for the return leg it found 70,000 AA miles on Cathay Pacific from MLE-IAD, but didn’t list it for 50,000 Alaska miles which I ended up booking. (only a 140,000 Alaska award on Korean option was shown)
I’m guessing it didn’t display because Cathay isn’t bookable at Alaska website so it couldn’t search? But it would have been nice to at least list it as a possible option and advise you to call to see if Alaska had that same award availability in order to save 20,000 miles on each ticket like I did.
I also had trouble getting results for domestic flights like mentioned above.
Finally for some reason it didn’t find any of the 37,500/each results for a 4 person TYO-IAD economy trip I searched for even though the award.flights chrome app found two different awards available which aeroplan confirmed for the 37,500 miles each.
For these reasons I chose to not renew after my month was up. I hope the improvements are made as this has a lot of potential.
@Greg- So, if there is availability on Etihad for Guest Seats, will a search from JFK to AUH pop up without having to do the trick to search?
Yes, that’s my understanding
@Greg- Is it still showing for example JFK to Mumbai on Cathay with JFK to HKG in First and then HKG to Mumbai in Business when searching for JFK to Mumbai or do we have to search for separate legs? Thanks!
As long as the first class leg is 51% or more of the travel distance, it will continue to show options like that. I just ran a quick first class search for JFK to BOM and found, for example, JFK-HND first class (57%) then NRT-BOM in economy. I know that you wouldn’t want that particular result, but it shows that it will show mixed cabin results as long as first class is the majority
I subscribed to the monthly plan yesterday and wasn’t too thrilled with the tool. Yes, it is an improvement over going to each airline site and searching. But what would make it worth the $29.99 would be more search filters (e.g. the FF or bank program I have points with) and an alert when my desired award becomes available.
Good suggestions. And, I agree specifically about alerts: I think that’s the key feature many are waiting for to make the monthly plan worth the price. I’m curious why you chose to go right to the $29.99 option when you could have started with $10?
Thanks Greg – really enjoy your blog! The award I’m looking for is a little difficult to find (multiple over water segments) but I know the exact airline and segment that I’m still missing. So a longer term subscription would help.
Ouch my eyes. If you need a professional web developer with React/Redux experience…email me.
[…] I’d take a quick check to make sure I wasn’t missing a better option. I pulled up JuicyMiles to see my award options quickly. I have to admit, I’m still not sold on the JuicyMiles price […]
[…] I would have otherwise expected to see but had not at United.com when I was searching from NYC. (Link to our post on Juicy Miles if you want to read more about […]
The tool appears to have issues with the married segment logic from AA. International flights with domestic connections are showing as available on aa.com but not with this tool. Searching the domestic connecting flights separately on aa.com show as unavailable which leads me to believe the tool is not taking into account the extra availability that aa provides via the married segment routing.
[…] the Juicy Miles tool a shot to see if I was missing something (you can read more about Juicy Miles in Greg’s review). At this point, I began searching Myrtle Beach to other cities. Juicy Miles told me that […]
I tried it for about an hour and had some issues. Main one is Business Class showing as available, but an example is SFO to Europe, where the long leg is economy, which is useless. Also, the 3-day window is way too small for me – I am very flexible in dates. I was surprised that the online Chat seemed very fast and helpful even at the weekend. They took my complaints and verified I was correct and said they would pass this on to management.
It also doesn’t understand the relationship between BA and Alaska, for example and so I could not get anything decent to Hawaii from West Coast. Doesn’t have Avianca, etc.
But I think if one has a limited number of dates (like, say, near the date of travel) then it could be useful. I may try again before my 5 days are up and see if it is able to help me, though I don’t have anything to book right now.
@Frank.
Since using the program a few times as well as in concert with AS/UA/BA etc.. The issue lies in the “mixed cabin” offerings by airlines. I was frustrated a little but this but if you eliminate all mixed cabin in search then imho you would end up with few end results.
It looks like they now show % of cabin travel.
The other issue for example CX YVR to HKG and HKG to JNB/TLV only the first leg has a F cabin the 2nd just Biz. As well fewer and fewer carriers are offering F (granted you mentioned biz).
Scroll down to the bottom and the team page is obviously all stock photos. Can do a Google image search and see. Not sure FM did his diligence here.
Thanks for sharing this. Not all of the photos are stock photos, but a lot of them appear to be. I agree that it is extremely weird to use stock photos in place of real photos, but I highly doubt there was any shady intent in that. I mean, what could they gain by it? I know they have a large team, so it’s definitely not a matter of trying to appear bigger than they are. I see it as nothing but a big PR blunder. My guess (and it is just a guess) is that they set up the software before getting photos of the whole team and have prioritized award search enhancements and bug fixes ahead of updating the images. But again, that’s just a guess. I’ll reach out to Adam to get his 2 cents.
UA2 / Greg, this is Adam. We give our staff the option to provide a profile picture or remain anonymous. For the vast majority of our team, this is a side gig and many choose to stay anonymous and prefer their employers remain unaware of the time they devote to award booking. In fact, I was just “Adam” and had no picture until about a year ago when I left my regular job to run JM and Point Me full-time. That same courtesy is given to the entire team, if they want to share they are welcome to, otherwise they can simply provide a bio or their name, it’s completely up to them. If they choose not to share, they can pick a photo to represent them, a practice used on other sites and that our dev team recommended. I can personally relate to our team members as I had one employer who restricted me from contributing to either site while I was employed and another who tolerated it but did not want clients seeing my full name, bio or picture on the web. My BoardingArea profile is actually still blank (https://boardingarea.com/our-bloggers/). There was no ill will or shady intent here – we simply focused on the technology behind the new site and the tool prior to relaunch and admittedly should have devoted more time to the staffing page decisions and perception. That said, we want to be as genuine as possible with our clients and so we’re making a change. Team members who do not wish to share will have their pictures replaced with a stylized avatar.
I guess it takes over 3 months to change an image because the website still has fake employee photos.
No offense Greg, but brushing off plain dishonesty as only “extremely weird” and suggesting it’s not “shady” doesn’t sit well with me, especially when you stand to benefit financially. And your willingness to offer up your own proposed excuses prior to Adam replying speaks volumes.
A true impartial response would have just been your last line, “I’ll reach out to Adam to get his 2 cents.” Everything else you wrote shows where your priorities really are.
Sorry Andy, maybe I’m being dense, but I just don’t understand why anyone would care about this? What matters is whether the tool is worth the price. Do you care when browsing Hilton’s website that a stock photo person pops up and asks if you need help?
Not sure if I didn’t browse Hilton long enough, but I don’t see any fake stock photo person offering me help. On mobile, I saw a pop-up box for a virtual assistant, which is pretty honest about what it is, actually. With that said, I’m aware that some companies do what you suggest (and maybe Hilton does too, but I just didn’t find it).
I do care when this happens, but I care a lot more when it’s a small company that demands payment up front as opposed to an established brand with a website that is free to use.
When I consider giving money to an unknown entity, knowing about who is behind the company is important. Would you give money to a Kickstarter if you knew that the product video was done by hired actors using a script purporting to be the founders of the company? (I wouldn’t.) So far we have a company being dishonest with fake company profiles and an empty promise from three months ago to make a change because they want to be “as genuine as possible” with their clients. Apparently they changed their mind about that.
I got out of the Plastic Merchant without losing any money because of a couple of small issues like this. Up until that point, all of my payments had been received in full and on-time without any issues. Is that all that should have mattered?
Integrity is very important, and I really don’t see that here.
One of their team members under the name Charli is just a stock photo image: https://www.gettyimages.fi/detail/photo/young-woman-smiling-towards-camera-with-dyed-pink-royalty-free-image/844230194
Actually two more members of their team pop up here under different names: http://mrblueandqueenie.net/coaches/ Something tells me Juicy’s team is faked.
Great review Greg. I was waiting for someone to review them before I tried but I couldn’t wait and I signed up a few days ago because I had a complicated booking to Asia for later in the year (October). I figured I’d sign up for the monthly service because you get a discount for the booking if you’re a subscribed member so I still came out ahead and could try the service out for 30 days.
I used Alex N. with JuicyMiles who was EXCELLENT in helping me find awards. I’d consider myself an intermediate user in your example above. Even with Alex giving me all the details, I couldn’t get their software to duplicate it. So on tougher bookings with free stop overs it’s really tough to find it on your own even using heir software.
There are some BIG annoying things they need to fix (especially when using their website on mobile devices like iPhone). When you want to put in a new city search there is no easy way to delete that pair and you have to go and select everything and delete the entire city pair. It wouldn’t be too big of a deal if they had a 3 letter airport code but they automatically input the entire city so it’s a pain backspacing and deleting the entire word. They need an easy option to X the entire city to input a new airport code.
I cancelled the subscription and will just use Alex N. on complicated bookings. It was well worth the time savings and aggravation of trying to piece together the trip myself.
One thing I did NOT like is when booking the award services, is they quoted a price and then when I paid with my credit card, they added on a surcharge. I don’t like businesses that charge a surcharge to use a credit card as that has become the universal method to pay these days. It wasn’t a huge amount. I think maybe 3% or something but still a pain to get charged a % surcharge when paying with a credit card.
Wow. Can’t believe an online business doesn’t factor in credit card fees into their cost of doing business. I assume they want you to use a debit card – something I’ve never in my life done and won’t be starting now just to use this service. If their margins are that close, they won’t be around very long. IMO.
They had a PayPal option to pay with your credit card if I recall correctly. But it made it look like you could either pay with your PayPal account OR your credit card. Naturally NONE of us would pay with Debit card or Paypal vs. earning points with a credit card (plus for consumer protection).
But in this day and age, online businesses have to be able to make it convenient and free to use a credit card. A consumer shouldn’t be penalized for using a credit card to pay. A wise business should just factor in ALL costs of doing business and just raise their price vs. trying to sneak in a % surcharge because you’re paying with a credit card. It’s not very smart IMHO.
In the end it might be the same price if they raise their fees but it’s just smart marketing 101 to have an “all in cost” for a service vs. saying you charge $X and then charge $X plus Y for credit card surcharge.
Don’t get me wrong. I was happy with the booking services provided by Alex N. and JuicyMiles. I think ultimately that’s where they still will make the vast majority of their money. I think the subscription thing just is something that might even ironically help them with their income stream with the paid booking services by professionals.
Any idea why it won’t show American flights? Tried numerous searches and not a single AA flight. Go to AA and there are plenty.
[…] Juicy Miles: Finally, a Kayak-like tool for flight awards! […]
[…] Award Searches Made Easier: Wow, Juicy Miles has brought out an amazing tool that will making searching for your next award flight easier. I’m definitely going to be using this for my next award search! […]
I’d like to try this, but it won’t accept my credit card, I tried two different ones.
That’s very strange! Did you contact them about it?
There is a trade off on the high price point. They will get fewer subscribers. The current pricing is too high for me. I plan, on average, two trips per year so each trip would cost me $180. With a lower price point, they would get more casual subscribers like me which would likely more than compensate for the trade-off on higher price/fewer subscribers. It seems to me when you are trying to get a business off the ground, you build your base with intro pricing and raise the price as demand grows. If this is the intro price, I can only imagine what the later pricing strategy is…too expensive now.
[…] Juicy Miles: Finally, a Kayak-like tool for flight awards! by Frequent Miler. Has anybody actually tried Juicy Miles before? It seems quite expensive ($29.99 a month) and I hate how they don’t have a free trial. The fee of $200 for customized help seems excessive as well. Personally I just use the Travel Codex award searcher as a base and then go from there. […]
How does it handle the Chase multiplier if you have Preferred or Reserve?
It doesn’t consider the use of Chase points in that way. It only looks at the use of Chase points by transferring those points to airline miles. The transfer ratio to airline miles is the same regardless of whether you have the Preferred or Reserve.
[…] Juicy Miles: Finally, a Kayak-like tool for flight awards! by Frequent Miler. Has anybody actually tried Juicy Miles before? It seems quite expensive ($29.99 a month) and I hate how they don’t have a free trial. The fee of $200 for customized help seems excessive as well. Personally I just use the Travel Codex award searcher as a base and then go from there. […]
I’m just curious how they’re getting the info on availability? I understand how KVS, etc work but if there are awards they can show available that normally you have to call and check on how do they manage it? Comparison of several searches and known availability/fees? I can’t imagine loyalty programs are giving back door access….and really I’m surprised if they can continue to use all of the booking engines to pull info from long term. I do trust you’ve done due diligence though, I might give the 5 day a try the next time I can’t find the availability I want. I think those of us who are experienced at searching just figure we know most everything and can’t imagine a computerized search will find something we haven’t thought of. We figure the only benefit is notification of new space opening up…and yeah it seems expensive long term waiting on availability to show up. Maybe a cheaper price to continue to monitor availability rather than perform new searches would be helpful….maybe
I’m hoping that Adam will jump in here to answer. I think these are good questions.
There is a price point at which I would be interested but like many commenters $360 is just too much.
I assume that the overhead cost per subscriber is pretty low so I would think that 30,000 subscribers at $150/year is more valuable to them then 10,000 at $360, but maybe there are overhead components I don’t understand.
I’m sure that the owners have done their caclulus that they will get more revenue at that price point than trying to compete with expertflyer at a lower rate. Maybe. In terms of profile of the people in the market for a service like this I’m exactly the guy I think they want to try to market to, and I just can’t justify this cost. Maybe I would get $260 more per year in value out of it than I do out of expert flyer but I’m skeptical and not willing to pay money just to do a trial run to figure it out when I’m very happy with EF.
I am about to retire and plan on traveling a lot so this is a potential tool I would use. I plan my trips 2 years out because I am depressed if I have to fly BA or business. Here’s how I would use it:
1. Buy 5 day over long weekend and then camp out at the computer with a Napa cab.
2. Pick 3 places I plan to travel overseas in the next 2 years. I use the the Tesla Supercharger map for domestic travel.
3. After seeing the potential for those trips then I might adjust my credit cards and spend to move me to the award. In that sense I value this as a once every so often tool to ensure the award is still true to what I am saving for.
4. What I didn’t see well discussed is what if I only want to see First Class? Think that should be broken out. Sorry Delta.
BTW. Best post I’ve read from you in recent months. I am glad to know you still are on your toes! Great share and hope this lives up to everyone’s expectations!
I was interested in giving it a try, but the pricing model is a hard NO for me. $9.99 just to even try one search to see how it works and whether the service is something I could benefit from? Nope.
I posted earlier with my thoughts on the pricing. It just always that they haven’t put a lot of thought / research into that. But this is a great idea and I hope it works. Heck, I’d even invest in it since there is a market need, but the pricing is out of touch.
I will definitely try this at the $10 level some time soon. Would not normally pay $10 site unseen (yes, went for the pun there), but Greg’s reveiw and the screenshots are very promising. I wish I had more time in the next few days so I could try it out straightaway 🙂
Count me with the masses who don’t see myself subscribing the $30/month level, other than maybe a month or two at a time for a special trip. I’m in the “great for intermediate” bucket (btw, I love that the review was summarized this way and agree with the assessment). If I can save 3k points and/or a couple hours of my time – plus ease my chronic FOMOitis 🙂 -that is def. worth $30 for a trip. But sadly I don’t take enough of the sorts of trips that would justify this long-term at this price. I’m assuming for most domestic flights I wouldn’t actually save many points, just some time and maybe some bad-interface-frustration.
Look forward to seeing people post their actual experiences with the site too.
Does it show the awards with unpredictable availability such Virgin Atlantic being able to see a certain seat on an ANA flight?
I’m not sure what you mean about unpredictable availability, but they do say that they can find ANA flights bookable with Virgin Atlantic. I haven’t tested that.
When you see seats available on ANA website and Expertflyer but when you call Virgin they don’t see the award space
I love the idea of this site, but I already know where to search for awards, so this would be purely a convenience. $1/day is too much to ask for nearly any subscription service. There’s a reason Hulu lowered their price to $5.99 recently.
I’d be willing to pay maybe $5/month for something like this. Then we’d be in set-it-and-forget-it territory, and they’d make more money off of me at $60/year than $5-30 depending on how little availability there is and how long I have to keep trying searches. I tend to search year-round to look for possibilities and general trends, so five days or a month won’t cut it, and the annual price is crazy.
Maybe there’s a market of newbies or full-time travelers out there, but I doubt it’s large enough for this to work. Who knows, though, I could be wrong. They obviously don’t need as many people to bite at the current price point, so I guess time will tell.
I do not see the option for the $9.99 5 day use on the website. Is this no longer available?
Click on Select below it ..It’s Good …CHEERs
There is no option for $9.99
Click on the menu item “Pricing” at the top of the screen. You’ll see the $9.99 5 Day Unlimited Auto Search Pass option on the left
I’ve updated this post to note that the cancel subscription button has actually been live since last week (oops). There’s now a picture of it in the Pricing section of this post.
Any thought on whether Juicy Miles handle phantom award availability? Those have been given me a lot of headache recently (lots of Air China flights showing up on United website but not actually bookable). I’m assuming that the tool wouldn’t know what is vs. isn’t real, but of course happy to be told otherwise.
I had that BS with Delta 3x I booked the ticket then 3 months later “That Flt. no longer Available ” BUT we have another BUT $80 fuel charge .
CHEERs
Thanks for being so transparent with your financial incentives. I trust you because of this. I’ve seen this tool written about on other blogs with no mention of the commission, leading me to be suspicious of their motives and question how good this tool really is. Great to see a complete, honest review. I will try it for sure.
This sounds right up my alley. I hate award searching and am also not good with remembering a LOT of rules and timings, etc. I tend to do all planning in one long day of searching for everything so for $10, this is a great deal for me. Like that other fellow above said, time is money. I’ll be giving this a try soon!
Time is only money if you would be engaging in a money-making endeavor instead. Searching for award flights in your after-work free time is not costing you any money in exchange for your time.
Your free time is still valuable as you could be doing other things aside from award searching.
Let’s say it would normally take you 1 hour to search and complete an award booking, but this tool can reduce your total time to 15 minutes. That’s 45 minutes of free time that could be used doing other things and people do place a monetary value on their free time. (i.e. would you rather make $60k/year with 30 vacation days or $80k/year with 10 vacation days? There’s a trade-off there where a person may say 20 extra vacation days is worth $20k/year less in salary, or vice versa.)
Hi Greg, thanks for the recommendation. We trust you for sure. I don’t have a travel plan near future but has something in mind in next year’s travel (Yeh, I am starting to plan my 2020 travel already). The $10 is not a problem for me if it could create higher value for my family similar to why we pay the hefty annual fee for those premium cards.
The business mode is interesting. I agree 5-day makes the most sense as after all, most of us only travel a few times each year and don’t need search everyday. I haven’t tried the service yet, but I hope it has a seat monitor feature that would alert me when the seat becomes available. However, I feel it is not that fair to pay $29.99/month for simply maintaining that alert. I think maybe $5/month would make more sense and a further discount if the user decides to sign up an annual subscription? I am not the operator, maybe it cost a lot to search. But considering there are quite a few price monitoring programs like Camelcamelcamel, slikedeals, and cashbackmonotoring. It is equally not fair to ask much when those others are free. Maybe the $5/month is a daily search cost and customers can opt to a higher one if they want a 12-hour-check or even more frequent search?
Anyway, interesting website. Hope I would take advantage of it someday when my needs come.
OK, finally got some time to read through the article in a very quick manner. Just add some comments here:
1. Add paid ticket as a reference. Yeh, it could be easily more than just one more top item but kind of asking to have a kyayak website. For simple solution, Juicy Miles could redirect the customers to Kayak or Google flight in pop-up windows and earn a small referral fee. The ideal case is that Juicy Miles could work with the other service provider like Google flight and pass the already-entered filter info and then integrate the results into the current award ticket page so that the customers don’t have to go back and forth. The best candidate could be Google flight since they have the best algorithm to give you one or two best options. You just need to see how to show those info in your own search result page.
2. Add those perks of premium cards such as CSR, Presitge/Premier, Business Platinum, and even $100 domestic discount ferom RC or other visia infinite cards. It would be appreciated by those card holders.
3. Generate Best award options: similar to Google Search who automatically generate “Best cash options”, the website should create an algorithm to pick the best choice based on the results and customer’s profile/preference.
4. Good customized search: the website shall ask customers to tell it which frequent miles and transferabl points they have, and automatically apply those limits in the search. Furthermore, I am expecting: for exameple, the website should notify the customers that certain transfer bonus promotion is ongoing which could alter which is the best option. They can even suggest a point transfer now out of speculation based on customer’s past travel pattern or expected “future travel plan”.
5. Not sure if it is a good idea, Juicy Miles could team up with awardwallet to share the mile balance information assuming they are not competing with each other (are they?), it would make the screening more accurate. It is very often that people have some miles, but not enough. For example, if you have lot of certian miles, but you are planning for a big family, you may stil not have enough miles for the current search. So teaming up with the Awardwallet can prevent some “false positive”
F
Yes a con game play one against another site u own how can THEY Lose ?? Then how can this b disproved maybe they can run for office in Ill.
CHEERs
$30/month for a cobbled together website still in beta? What a money grab. It’s a replica of https://awardex.io, which also shouldn’t be charging. FM is legit but this is pure greed. Pretty shameless.
I don’t fault someone from using capitalism per se, but it’s a pure money grab for the uneducated. And the value of either service is being pumped up way too much here. Kind of disappointing to see on FM.
But wouldn’t the uneducated have the highest willingness to pay for this service? If I knew very little about award redemptions, it may be worth it to fork over some money ($10) to see the best use of points/miles.
That being said, $360/year on this service is not going to capture the hearts, minds, or wallets of anyone. If you are going to be using their $10 service more than 3 times/month, you have insane amounts of points or are consulting many people on optimal use.
What would make sense, then, would to have a shared login for family/friends. I think my personal willingness to pay for this is about $50/year.
IMO, 10 bucks for 5 days is more than fair and will let them make some money while allowing occasional travelers to use the site. I’ll definitely use it next time I am planning a big trip.
Man I really want to sign up for this an use it long term but def cannot justify $30 a month. $10-$15 a month is tops
This tool looks like almost an exact copy of awardex.io – which works well and is cheaper.
They’re built by the same team. Awardex.io seems to have far fewer programs supported though. I just ran the same search on both platforms (DTW to FRA biz class) and found one-way award prices starting at 134K with awardex vs. only 50K with Juicy Miles.
Here’s the awardex pricing:
– You get 5 FREE search credits and you can upgrade to receive 10 monthly AwardEx credits for just $2.99/month with a special promo for new members at $1.49/mo for the first 3 months. If you are a power user you can sign up for our premium plan – 185 AwardEx credits for $49.99 / mo. Ad hoc credits are also available as needed for a single search.
So what ur showing us is u Can’t Trust Awardex to give u the Best award can I trust Juicy Miles ? Lets start another company and get all of the Award trade Oh my God !!!
Trust No One !!!
CHEERs
And oh by the way, if you can’t find something with the software tool, they also happen to sell paid human award-booking services. It’s a win-win for the companies.
Ryan
May the Award Gods Bless u !! Ur looking to THEIR next Step not mine as in more $$$$ to Them HaHa.
CHEERs
And is the JM result valid (no phantom availability, etc)? If they’re built by the same people, why the discrepancy?
The awardex site is based on the same software originally, but AwardEx hasn’t been updated since the team moved on to work with JuicyMiles. The discrepancy is because they’ve added lots of capabilities to JM, and will soon sunset AwardEx
Tell the Team they should’ve Axed first then next day done this . Puts everyone in a bad light and like a Wise another blogger said ” It’s a Beta version ” ..I was going to Buy this @ 4am because it was on FM but looked @ the yearly cost !!
What a Mess !!
CHEERs
Then my awardex t-shirt will become a collectible! Question: Will a Juicy Miles purchase code as 3xTY points ATT (AccessMore)?
I think this tool is only for novices who want to figure out, at a particular point in time, what awards are available and how to redeem them. But they won’t pay for a subscription. If they pay for a one-time use, there’s no guarantee they’ll find anything that fits their need. If they don’t, they’ll be disappointed and abandon the site. Also, there’re plenty of free tools to tell them what the best redemption is on a given route.
For more sophisticated users, what they need is a tool to alert them of the availability of awards on a given route, instead of constantly searching for them. There’s no free option there.
kind of agree. The business revenue is more likely from availability monitoring subscription rather than a one-time search. Unlike paid tickets whose availability is immediate and gradually attenuate, the award tickets is kind of “On/Off” thing. So there are some business opportunity here. However, the price should be right. I think a one-check(search)-per-day for each individual request is the way to price. If the customers has more than one plan, they shall pay according to request numbers.
Really surprised everyone is just dismissing this out of hand based on price. Assuming you sign up for a month and book a trip for 2, it’s 15 bucks a ticket. If this tool saves me an hour of searching it paid for itself. Time is money. If it actually saved me any miles it pays for itself. If you book 6 awards you’re talking about 5 bucks a ticket. That’s the same as the 9/11 security fee, yet it’s too expensive?
I think the main complaint is that the price is too high to justify a long-term membership. For those who find it convenient to join and quickly cancel (either because they have one concentrated burst of planning to do, or because they don’t mind signing up several times as needed), there’s a lot of potential value here. I just don’t understand why they want to price in a way that makes it unattractive to become and remain a member (using the service intermittently).
We’re already struggling with lower earning rates, ever-increasing redemption devaluations, and airline consolidations reducing our options. The last thing we need in this space is something that will make it easier for the masses to redeem. Yes it sometimes takes time and effort to find what you need, but that’s called sweat equity and is part of the game (and part of the fun, too, for me).
Don’t worry, the masses won’t pay $30/ month! Not even the people here will.
Too expensive for 98% of the customer base that would use this website. Offer a $99-$129 membership level that could be beneficial to me and I might bite. $30 a month is ridiculous.
I may be wrong, but I think that most people think of planning their big trip as a one time thing. e.g. get online to do research to find the best flights that match their needs and then book it. For everyone who does it this way, I think that the pricing model is extremely fair ($10 for 5 days). I agree about the $29.99 / month fee. I’m not sure who that’s targeted at.
Like what was stated No Flts Available $10 more please till the award flt. u need comes Available ..
I disagree about the one-time access being particularly valuable (e.g. $10). Beginners/Intermediates don’t necessarily have points in every program, and generally want to know which points they need to earn in order to go where they want to go. It does no good to pay $10 to find out that you don’t have the right points. Why wouldn’t someone just go to AwardHacker (free) to see what points they need, earn those points, and then search for availability in that program when they have those points? A more reasonable annual fee might be attractive–especially with availability alerts–but I don’t think that this pricing will work at all.
hi – I am a relative newbie but with several different trips in the pipeline at different times…and, as others have said, with availability changing all the time, the one time fee doesn’t work, and the $30/month is too high to sign up for award alerts. If they adjust the pricing model to be closer to Expert Flyer’s fee, even a bit higher to account for the fact that it’s easier to use, I would spring for it. But not at these rates, I’m afraid.
Greg, I know you know but you obviously forgot: the award availability of each airline are notoriously different and varying. Award tickets often require more than just one-time search. Usually the airline release some award tickets at the beginning of say 365 day (some 330 days), and then INTERMITTENTLY release some tickets at nobody-know time. When the departure day is close but most of the seats haven’t been sold, the airline will open up more seats for award redemption. So you see how this can be more than just one-time searching thing.
For award seat availability monitoring, the monthly price is kind of high. For me, I prefer a $2~5/month for a certain search request. My apple iCloud only changes me $2.99 for their least 200GB space. So it is not a small money at all. Like Netflix, start at a low subscription, and when customers are bigger and form the dependence, you can gradually increase the premium.
[…] Juicy Miles is a brand new user-friendly flight award search tool. I didn’t think it was possible. There are so many gotchas in trying to build a tool like this that most of those who have tried before have either given up or have created specialized tools that appeal only to experts. Somehow the Juicy Miles team has done it. It’s not perfect (is anything?), but it’s way better than I would have ever predicted. LEARN MORE! […]
I’m like most others that have already replied. I think their price point is out line with the market. I’m definitely not willing to pay $360 per year for this product, and I’m also not going to pay $10 just to try it. I occasionally browse award flights for fun, and this looks to be a handy tool for that type of activity. I would be willing to pay an introductory offer of somewhere around 99¢ for 24 hours so I could at least determine if I like the service.
I’ve been in the game long enough to know where to look to make sure I’m getting what I want out of my points. Even if I was using a product like Juicy Miles, I would still double check just to make certain I’m not leaving points on the table.
The miles/points community is largely comprised of folks that’s willing to spend a little extra time to maximize value. I’m not sure their pricing model fits with the majority of their target audience.
It likely is a good tool for beginners, but I wonder how many beginners will be willing to pay those prices to get this service.
I totally get that. They initially tried a 1 day free trial but quickly realized that most people would sign up for 24 hours to do their searches and then cancel. And they would repeat as needed with different email addresses (I’m not saying you would do that, but lots of people would).
I’m sure Adam and his team are reading these comments, so it will be interesting to see if they adjust the pricing model at all. I imagine it will depend upon how well they’re doing with the current model.
I hate that for them. Signing up with multiple accounts is no bueno. If a company (especially a small business) offers a product you like, just pay for it.
This is just a reality: the business model here always rewards those new customers (think about bank and cable companies) but punish those loyal customers. I also think it is ridiculous, but many gamers would take advantage of that. I have my citibank as my primary bank for over a decade. They pay me nothing. But if I come and go, each year, I may earn $200 sign up bonus. How ironic it is. Each time I see a new citi checking bonus, I call myself stupid.
U will get a 1099 for that No Thanks ..I’m at a Bank never gave me NUTTHING but great service and great rates for 30 years ..GOOD to keep banking and CC separate .
CHEERS
Fair point. But while we are largely willing to “spend a little extra time to maximize value”, we also understand investment and ROI. We happily pay $5.95 VGC fees when we can tape into a decent category bonus, and $550 annual fees on credit cards that provide enough perks. I haven’t given Juicy Miles a try yet but see $10/$30 as a worthy investment for a mere chance to save a bunch of miles or find better routing/time than what I can get on my own. A simple round-trip for two in premium cabin costs 300-400k miles. All you need is a ~0.5% improvement from this tool to break even.
@Greg- Does it show availability for example JFK to Mumbai via Qatar or will it just display JFK to DOHA? Also, Cathay from JFK to Mumbai or just JFK To HKG? Thanks!
Yes, it will show availability all the way through
@Greg- So, it will show even if one leg is First Class and the other is Business? Thanks again
Yes. I just ran that search and found (for example) Lufthansa first to Frankfurt and then business the rest of the way. It is a bit tricky to find first though because it also returns business results when you ask for first
I will be needing flights to Israel for Around Aug 19 2020 returning around Sep 12 from Jordan. Do you know when I should start looking for business class? The tool sounds like just what I will need. Thanks !
That’s a tricky (but good) question. Different award programs start releasing space at different times. In order to make sure that award flights are bookable when you search, you should probably start looking about 11 months before your return flight.
Which makes the upcoming Flight alerts and those with jobs with a set paid time off bank to redeem awards for trips a steal for $29 a month and can’t search easily during work hours or drop everything to take off to take advantage of a killer deal two weeks from now or close-in award travel deals that come up from time to time.
$360/yr is not a steal, but it sounds like you really enjoy shilling this. The cost of a single business class ticket of 85k miles and 100$ now becomes 85k miles and 460$.
The people with fixed time off will only be taking 1 or 2 trips, so like everybody else said, for a lower price point, this would make sense
Since posting this I signed up for the 5 – day trial and have run about 40 searches and now I have changed my mind about an annual membership it might be ok for a month maybe two when your looking to make a trip work.
But in those searches found a first class PDX-Mel flight time is about 16 hrs 60K UR on Qantas. can’t imagine trip in an economy seat.
Thanks for the article Greg! Very interesting tool and I hope as others have commented that they come up with a reasonable annual fee. I use ExpertFlyer but would like something like this site as it seems more user friendly.
Always appreciate your transparency and your great advice!
I’d just like to throw out 2 free sites that can help people maximize the use of their points. One is http://www.travelcodex.com/award-maximizer the other is http://www.awardhacker.com Neither site will let you search for awards on specific dates, but they will give you a good comparison of the various airlines’ award charts for particular routes.
@Greg-
How good is this to search for mostly First Class? Thanks
That’s exactly the kind of thing this tool is designed to help with.
How about flying from non-Gateway cities where you need to connect to a JFK, EWR, IAD, DFW etc? Does this tool show availability from cities like JAX etc where there is a connection to the obvious Gateway city? Thanks!
It will show you the connection if you can book the connecting flight with the same miles. Otherwise, you’ll have to run two searches: one from JAX to NYC (for example) and the second from NYC to wherever you want to go.
Thank Greg- Will it show availability for different class on different leg? For Example JFK to Mumbai is usually First Class leg and then Business Class Leg. Thanks again!
At $30/month this is only useful for professional travel planners like yourself. Expert Flyer is only $99/year
I’m assuming that many will only need a tool Ike this a few times per year. it would only be $10 for each big trip you plan. So, for most it would be $10 to maybe $40 per year. (I’m not a travel planner FYI)
It’s only $10 / trip though if there’s availability when you start looking. If you don’t find anything within the 5 day window then you have to either pay again or not find a flight.
I think I am the target audience (I would love this tool and pay for expertflyer), but I want a simple annual fee that I can pay and not think about. Maybe an annual rate of $199 or $249 would get me to commit today to an annual membership. I’m ok paying $50/trip (assuming I use this for 4-5 trips / year), but I don’t want to mess around with a 5 day membership, so a discounted annual membership is far more appealing.
That makes sense.
agree with this. 150/year and im sold.
Same. It’s just a little too pricey right now
Tim
Thanks I’m looking @ Expect Flyer another option and opinion for $99/year !!!!
CHEERs
Expert Flyer is great if you know which airline you want to fly and if they support award searches for that airline. Juicy Miles is great if you know where you want to go and want to find all the options for getting there
It’s their company a lot bigger base (me)@ $150 per year then $360 . Not everyone can buy a Benz .
CHEERs
I would also be interested at a different price point, but my usage pattern is to think intermittently about (several) future trips rather than to book everything for a given trip during 5 days, so I’d end up needing it during most months and constantly subscribing and unsubscribing would be bothersome, yet it’s not worth $360/yr to me for the gains over tools like ExpertFlyer and KVS.
As an aside, I don’t think that an annual subscription for $100-$150 will cost them much revenue from non-professionals (few of whom were likely to spend $30/month for a full year), so they just need to decide whether the amateur but expert market is worth having.
They may BK ExpertFlyer with that pricing too ..Competition=Lower Cost !!!
CHEERs
I look and book all year so $30 x 12 !!!! I’m sure it will work for lots but I’ll stick with Goggle flts and Lots of searching.
CHEERs
I think that even if you only take 1-2 major trips a year Its well worth it. The times savings alone (not to mention finding routing to your final destination you didn’t know or think about).
It will be even more valuable possibly once the flight alerts goes live 2/25 – and $29 a month. Esp for those of us, that have jobs with PTO with limited flexibility, and want to make the most of that annual vacation. It’s a small price to pay to enjoy the fruits of hobby.
Recently booked a major trip for our 25th anniv – I spent an inordinate amount of time (even missed out on saving 150k pts because I kept looking for a better deal over a week). Following day after booking same deal increased to almost 40% of original deal when I initially stumbled on that short lived deal. So the week I searching for better deal cost me another 150k pts – still a happy camper and feel I scored big .
FWIW I’m fairly new about two years, So I have amassed a nice war chest of points and miles while dancing with 5/24. This was the first use and a major hit to our hoard.
As points and miles become increasingly difficult to amass a tool like this is even more valuable – a great learning tool to even plan for future trips and card apps learning about the value of the various transfer partners on routes.
Once you are in the game for several more years and have studied airline programs and routing as your hobby as well as take more than 1 or 2 trips per year, the price is simply too high. I think that is CaveDwellers angle. There is an arsenal of tools that simplify the above (searches and redemption values) and that all comes with experience and time invested. No knowledge = pay. Knowledge = save. As far as points and miles go, there are vastly different numbers as to what one accumulated within the last limited 2 years (limited due to new bank restrictions) in comparison to i.e the last 8 years being in the game.
I don’t disagree – if you have the knowledge and/or the time to invest . For me Time=Money and the older I get the more value I see being less of a DIY in more and more areas – even if I have the skills and aptitude to do it. I learned that a Journeyman can do the job in a fraction of the time an often 10X better and correctly than say a weekend warrior on a remodel or other areas.
For me I enjoy hunting Unicorns, maximizing my points and earnings, looking for exploitable weak spots in the system and work-arounds. Would rather spend time learning more ideas to maximize the points/miles bonuses. I don’t mess with a tons of deals because the time investment is not worth the ROI. As well my DW only gets 6 weeks a year of PTO to work with but she has typically submit longer request (1-3 weeks) three months in advance and there is’nt a guarantee that it will be approved till it is. I run a business that is somewhat seasonal – but have much more flexibility.
For me the monthly investment is about 20 minutes of billable time. Also I enjoy the earning gave more than the award redemption game. Used to travel a ton when I was younger – now I hate to fly unless its in a premium cabin. Its hard enough keeping up with the changes in the earning game.
I will say that when I was younger, I would have probably been right alongside you posting a similar sentiment and would probably would have taken the time to learn the award hacking routes and look for unicorns.
I do regret missing out, on the “good days” of churning and earning. But with all the devaluations, changes taking place on an ongoing basis, and the limited time I can invest part of the year. This looks like an awesome program I truly hope it lives up to that.
To me the $200 to have an OTA I can contact if was stranded @ LHR because of flying thru the day after the BREXIT date, would help me sleep slightly better, which is exactly what we are facing, LOL.
UPDATE:
I signed up for a 5 day test drive and ran about 20 searches.
Verdict yeah the $30/mo not enough value at this time. But truly impressed and will definitely use it in the future – may sign up for 30 days from time to time when we are looking to plan trips.
BLOWN away found some First class seats PDX – MEL flight time 15:55 in First class on Qantas
Airbus A380-800 for 60K UR for this Fall. oh so tempted.
haha, agree on this. As the audience of this blog, we are demanding net profit even for those premium card. How can a website charge a hefty annual fee but only deliver one benefit, which we may or may not be able to use? I think the best way for the website is to make its customer group bigger such that it allure Google to buy it (those travel websites like Expedia and booking won’t buy it as award option will diminish the revenue on the paid ticket side). However, there is a risk if big business will invest on that since the people who redeem miles to buy ticket is still a small portion to the overall passenger pool.